Assembly Election Results LIVE Updates: Mann to Stake Claim at 10:30 AM to Form Govt; CM Yogi to Meet BJP Office Bearers in Lucknow
Assembly Election Results LIVE Updates: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s script to success in Uttar Pradesh is historic, but not completely simple. There are a myriad of factors and the BJP’s own efforts that helped the saffron party get reelected in the politically-important northern state. A split in anti-BJP votes, a push for narratives against the Samajwadi Party solidified through repeated campaigning and
meticulous backdoor planning helped spin the saffron yarn of success.
One of the seats won by the saffron party for a second term was a hot topic of debate among pollsters. Darul Ulum’s hometown is Deoband. The BJP has won Deoband, one of India’s most influential Islamic seminaries, for the second time in a row. The town is located in the Saharanpur district and has a 70 percent Muslim population, but the constituency only has 40 percent Muslim voters. Brijesh Singh of the Bharatiya Janata Party defeated Kartikeya Rana of the Samajwadi Party by 7,104 votes.
According to reports, All India Majlis-e-Ittehad Muslimeen (AIMIM) party candidate Umair Madani in Deoband received 3,500 votes. The margin of victory between the BJP and SP candidates was just over 7,000 votes. If the AIMIM had not fielded a candidate, those three thousand odd votes could have aided the SP candidate’s victory. The AIMIM did not run a candidate for this seat in the 2017 elections.
The saffron party may have benefited from the split in anti-BJP votes in a possible re-run of the 2017 results. The Bahujan Samaj Party’s Chaudhary Rajendra Singh and the Congress’ Rahat Khalil polled over 53,000 votes together, which could have benefited SP candidate Rana.
In 2017, the BJP’s Brijesh Singh received 1.02 lakh votes, benefiting from a vote split caused by Muslim candidates fielded by both the SP and the BSP. Majid Ali of the Bahujan Samaj Party received 72,844 votes, while Maviya Ali of the SP received 55,385 votes.
However, in a Muslim-majority seat, a non-Muslim BSP candidate receiving over 52,000 votes suggests that votes were not cast on religious lines. If this were the case, the Congress candidate would have won.
Meanwhile, in seats such as Lakhimpur Kheri and Hathras, BJP’s planning was so meticulous that the BJP won all eight seats in Lakhimpur, despite the fact that the district had become a hotbed of opposition protests following the October 3 incident in which farmers were run over by a vehicle.
